Despite its usefulness, unregulated use of the internet can adversely affect our health
I was recently shocked to learn that I was averaging more than four hours of screen time every day. Considering that each day has 12 hours of fruitful ‘human time’, every third day of my life was being spent on a screen. Continuing this would mean spending a
third of my remaining active life on the screen.
It appears that crowd psychology is being used to tap screen and internet usage to create addicts. While the players profit tremendously, they remain cold to the consequences and ride with a brilliant and brutal insensitivity.
Here are some stunning statistics:
• There are more than 40,000 networks in the world with their own TCP/IP standards
• There are more than 600 internet providers in India
• Nearly 70 per cent of the world’s population uses the internet (approximately five billion people)
• At least 840 million people in India are using the internet in 2022 compared with 357 million in 2007
There is no denying that the internet today aids in the provision of essential services such as the supply of water, electricity, food, travel, medicines and so on. It provides inexhaustible access to information, education, communication, online services for almost all commodities, social networking and entertainment. Major transport systems around the world, especially flights and trains, are internet dependent.
Even as I write this, I am using the internet to get data. However, one sadly notes that the internet is the monarch who, while providing a lifeline, has taken a stranglehold of almost all our lives. Artificial intelligence and the robotic world will rule this earth in a few decades from now. The question is “Quo vadis”? – Where am I going, where are you going or where are we going?
Our world is always in a series of revolutions backed by innovation and technological discovery. Information can be passed on quickly despite differing geographical positions. Digitisation has entirely changed how people work, bank, shop and carry out businesses. Corporations and government agencies have embraced digitisation to improve efficiency.
However, digitisation is a continuous process because experts worldwide continue to invent features that work faster, and make the passage of information easier and more efficient. Digitisation has undergone several milestones, each with its equal share of lesions and achievements that have helped shape current and future digital technology.
It got its start as far back as 1679, when Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed the first binary system. The end of the 20th century became a revolutionary time for digitisation. It improved services for manufacturing and industries that handle people, packages and transport
services. Later came high quality digital telecommunication, digital electronic payment systems, digital films, the development of cameras, telescopes and medical imaging, digital entertainment and news services, digital voting, crypto currency and more.
